The Minister Primarily

by John Oliver Killens

  Actually, he was human, so he loved adoration, especially when it was aimed at him. He hated it, he told himself, but he suffered quietly. He ate it up, actually. He’d always wanted to be a “moving pitcher” star like Belafonte or Poitier or Sammy or Ossie Davis, and he didn’t believe in segregated thinking (crow jim) jim crow in reverse, so he’d always wanted to be a movie star like Marlon Brando and Robert Redford and Burt Reynolds. And why not? He’d, since memory, been a handsome bloke, and since he obviously had this latent sex appeal, why in holy hell not? Where had modesty gotten him? If any?

  Just as he came out of his daydream visit to Hollywood back to the brilliant reality of the dazzling East Room of the White House, one fair lady, blond and placid faced, said to him graciously, “Of course you are undoubtedly from one of those African tribes, Your Excellency? I mean, with all your savoir faire, your suavity and urbanity, I mean you’re incredibly handsome and you’re debonair and you’re terribly sophisticated. Yet and still—” She laughed ecstatically. “I mean—” “Tittered” would have been a more precise description of what she did so elegantly. “Does your tribe practice cannibalism?”

  He looked up and beyond the tittering lady, at the full-length portrait of Martha Washington in a long white gown. He thought, amusingly, she might be eavesdropping. He smiled back at the excited lady and at the group around them with equal portions of suavity and urbanity and a slight dash of sardonic bitters. “Mais certainement, madame. Vous avez raison.” Why was he always speaking his half-assed French? Perhaps Martha was a ghostly spy. “I am descendent historically from a long illustrious line of distinguished missionary eaters. Our special tribal pièce de résistance is missionary stew au gratin.” He stared at her and licked his lips. “Cannibalism is one of the principal qualifications for prime ministership.”

  The little lady paled, as the powder on her face vanished suddenly and her tiny eyes grew large and wide, and she panicked momentarily, as did others in the group around them. As a matter of fact, the lady swooned.

  Meanwhile the group around the President had dispersed and over in a corner of this proud but unpretentious salon, this brightly lit gymnasium, Senator Huey of Alabama and Carlton Carson of the Secret Service and Parkington of the State Department had their heads together.

  Senator Huey was holding forth. “I still say something didn’t smell right out at that there airport today. And when my nose leads me to a tree there’s bound to be a possum up it every time. Three things prove it. One: he didn’t like our Southern National Anthem.”

  Parkington said belligerently, “I don’t like your Southern National Anthem either. What does that make me?”

  Huey said, losing color, “Two: he was singing over ‘John Brown’s Body.’ And Three: he had the President and the Russian ambassador shaking hands, and that’s an ominous threat to the peace of the Free World. Suppose all of a sudden, every American and every Russian started shaking hands unilaterally? Can’t you see the dire consequences of the kind of avanty-gardie symbolism Olivamake was perpetrating out yonder at the airport this afternoon? It could get outa hand and run hog wild.”

  Even liberal-minded Parkington was stunned by such an overpowering image. Carlton Carson, himself, was speechless—temporarily.

  Senator Huey held forth. “This here symbolism is more subversive that that damn white dove Picasso painted.” He worked himself into a fury. “It’s—it’s—it’s—it’s downright un-American! It—it could lead to almost any damn thing! Think of it! Everybody all over the world shaking hands unilaterally!” He was ashen and unnerved by the flights of his own fancy.

  “The whole damn performance looked like Commonist infiltration to me,” Carlton Carson of SS growled after he recuperated.

  Parkington of the State Department also recuperated and still insisted vigorously, “Forget your stupid nose, Senator, and your symbolisms, you’re barking up the wrong damn tree, as usual.”

  Huey’s eyes were wide with fear. He wiped the sweat from his narrow forehead. “If everybody on earth shook hands with each other, what would happen to the Commonist threat? That’s the greatest danger of it all. Enough to drive a man to drink!”

  Parkington stared at Huey as if he could not believe his eyes and ears.

  “Don’t pay Parkington no mind,” Carson said truculently to the senator. “I’m gon keep my eye on that witch doctor. He don’t act like they supposed to act. I know nigrahs and he don’t act like one.”

  “He is not a Negro,” Parkington of the State Department said, losing patience with his colleagues by the second. “He’s His Excellency Jaja Okwu Olivamaki.” The three of them might have gotten into a fistfight, had not Daniel Throckmorton entered at that moment and saved the day.

  Daniel Throckmorton had been an ex-ambassador-at-large assigned to Africa and spent many months in Guanaya when it was a colony of Her Majesty’s United Kingdom. He considered himself an old friend of the new Prime Minister Olivamaki. He was fiftyish, a tall strikingly handsome dark-haired blue-eyed important-looking gentleman, of Irish extraction, who would not have missed the reception for Olivamaki for all the world and was sorry as hell that he was late. Another gentleman came into the glittering drawing room along with Daniel Throckmorton. He was Wilfred Ellington Vaughan-Johnson, very lately of West Africa, but originally of Wales in the Queen’s United Kingdom. Short legged and a bit on the roundish side, he had difficulty keeping pace with his long-legged colleague, the ex-ambassador-at-large. Vaughan-Johnson was an “Old Coaster,” one of the very last of that dying breed that had gone to Africa as a buggerish lad as a part of some glorious You-Kay civilizing scheme of commercial benevolence and economic liberation and Christian deliverance and had stayed for thirty or forty years, and sat in the shade in Accra and Lagos and Ouagadougou and Port Harcourt and Calabar and Khartoum and Bamakanougou, and sipped their gin and tonics and pined for jolly London Town and talked with each other about the bloody “lazy natives,” and became experts on colonialism. They were legendary. There were as many stories about them as there were about the American traveling salesman and the farmer’s daughter.

  When Senator Huey saw Throckmorton enter, his red face beamed, as glowingly as the Bohemian cut-glass chandeliers above them. “That’s just the man we need to talk to. He was all over that colored continent. He’s bound to know this Olivamaki fellah.” He moved through the elegant mob toward Throckmorton with Carlton Carson breathing heavy on his heels.

  In another corner two distinguished-looking elderly white-haired gentlemen of Caucasian descendency were bending their elbows with Kentucky bourbon and profoundly discussing the weighty problems of a troubled world. One could tell at a glance that these were men of great substance and tremendous erudition. One of them smacked his lips and stared past the other one and sighed long and longingly.

  “Oh me-me-me-me-me!” he said wistfully. “I sure could use me a nice young piece of virgin poonytang this evening of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ—nice and plump and maiden-headed—with grand new feral uncombed heavenly pubescences—!” He smacked his lips again and shook his grizzly head.

  Tears of nostalgia came to the eyes of the other white-haired gentleman and his quivering mouth ran water, even as he gently admonished his tried-and-trusted friend of yore. “Congressman, you ought to be ashamed of yourself, you lecherous bastard, taking the name of the Lord thy God in vain.”

  In still another corner a group of distinguished-looking colored gentlemen (African Americans) were also elbow-bending. There were about seven of them, all ages, college professors, doctors, lawyers, and one sepia performer, who was a big-time celebrity, which makes it obvious why he shall be nameless. The big-time celebrity, who shall be nameless, had just left his white admirers and walked over to them and chided them good-naturedly.

  “That’s what I say about you colored folkses,” he mimicked. “Always segregating yourselves. Even all you saddity Black boogwuggies! Frazier had you dead to rights.”

  They laughed
appreciatively. He was so famous and so celebrated not one of them individually could take obvious umbrage, or else the great one might not give that one of them his address when the others weren’t looking so that he might one day dare to invite the Famous One to one of his more intimate parties—intimate to the extent of being exclusive, that is.

  The Great One put his arms around the shoulders of a couple of them and they all came together gratefully into a football huddle. “This big Black dude from the Big damn Apple was driving through Georgia in a big white Cadillac two blocks long,” the celebrated one began in his famous resonant voice. “He was doing seventy-five down the middle of the highway when he passed a speed cop in a police car sitting in ambush off the road. He knew the speed limit was sixty and he glimpsed the white cop in his black Ford, but he did not slow down, because how can a little black Ford catch up with a big white Cadillac?”

  They laughed anticipatingly and out of tremendous expectations. The Famous One continued. “The Ford car started to give chase and gain on our man in the Caddy, and he promptly put his foot further into the gas tank and the speedometer went to eighty, but when he looked into the rearview mirror he saw that the black Ford was still gaining, whereupon our hero’s dark face lit up to face the challenge and he shoved it in and let the drivers roll. His great white hog was doing a hundred now and the little black Ford was still gaining. He shoved it in from a hundred to a hundred and twenty, and the little black Ford whizzed by him like he was standing still and pulled in front of him and made a roadblock across the narrow highway. Our black hero got out of his long white defeated Cadillac believing in that great White Magic or something or other that was always defeating colored people. ‘I’ll willingly pay my fine double, Mister Charlie,’ he said, ‘if you’ll just show me what you got underneath that hood that makes your little old black Ford outrun my big long white Cadillac!’ . . . ‘Fair enough,’ the officer said, and he lifted the hood and there, to our disgusted hero’s great chagrin, were four panting Negroes wearing sneakers. Our hero shouted, ‘Wawa!’ and paid Cap’n Charley a hundred dollars.”

  The colored gentlemen roared with laughter, but roared gently, and with moderation, because to roar boisterously would be to contribute to the stereotype white folks had diligently constructed about them, and they were all dedicated “race” men. They were the kind of men who would never join a march or a picket line or order watermelon in a public restaurant, or pork chops, or—but you get my point, dear credulous readers. Meanwhile, during their aborted outburst, the Famous One had slipped away from them in search of greener pastures. (In explanation of the word “Wawa!” which in those troubled times was always spelled with an exclamation point: It was an expression that simply meant “White America Wins Again!” Hence the acronym, WAWA!)

  Meanwhile, back to the ersatz Prime Minister. He was surrounded by another group and engaging them in conversation, but had for the last half hour a feeling of being under sharp and heavy surveillance, but he had not been able to locate the owner of the eyes that watched his every move and motion. The Secret Service? The FBI? His host of long-lost creditors? The CIA? He was smiling charmingly at a lovely lady, when he heard a voice behind him, a friendly strangely familiar voice that struck terror in his buttocks. Instinctively he moved swiftly away from the group to a vantage point where he could survey the multitude and spot his friendly tormentor. That voice-that-voice-that-friendly-terrifying-voice! Who the hell belonged to it? His tormentor had disappeared completely. What he did see was His Wife’s Bottom and Tangi looking for him desperately, and he outfoxed them once again with his great footwork and moved to the other side of the drawing room.

  Halfway across the room he saw it coming out of the rightmost corner of his right eye, he glimpsed the blond one leaping for him, but alas too late for his fast footwork to put him in good stead this time. Just as he turned, the blond long-haired one landed around his neck, and it was embarrassingly undignified for His Excellency and also undignifiedly embarrassing for His Excellency as he tried to extricate himself. In one terrifying moment he had placed the unseen voice of a few months ago, as that of the blond plug-ugly from the Ambassador Palace Hotel in Bamakanougou who had caught up with him at the White House. “You’re an American! You’re an American!” he imagined he heard the blond apparition saying as it lunged toward him. But when he saw and felt that this one was soft and roundish and bumpy and swollen, in special places, he was relieved but immediately embarrassed again.

  This luscious, lushed, eloquently equipped, blond young woman, bountifully chested, admirably hind-parted, shouted, “Darling! It’s been so long, you beautiful manful hunk of brown-black sugar lump! I have not seen hide nor hair of you since I can not even remember when I ever did see hide nor hair of you—It’s been so—”

  The poor lad finally and valiantly fought himself firmly out of her clutches and rose to ever greater heights of dignity, even as he wondered whether she was some Hollywood escapade, some chickadee of his long-lost innocence come home to roost. He said very gravely, “Madame, I assure you, we have never met before. And for that discrepancy on my part, I am indeed regretful.” She was double-breasted and had the kind that were displayed in such obvious abundance and well below the cleavage point, you could never look her straight in the eyes. Hers had been known to drive men permanently cross-eyed.

  Her knees buckled slightly, and she straightened up again all up against our chagrined hero. “I’m sorry too,” she assured him. “I’m sorry that I’ve never been to Guanaya, or to Africa for that matter, so how could we possibly have met before? But it would have been such great fun meeting you for the first time somewhere out there in the bush.”

  Well?

  Also meanwhile, His Wife’s Bottom was waylaid by the umpteenth white guest who asked Vice–Prime Minister Lloyd to fetch him a Scotch and soda, which was due to the fact that His Wife’s Bottom was the only member of the PM’s party who had dressed in Western style in an American tuxedo. The rest of them had worn their long white flowing glowing ethnic boubous like they had some sense and according to the Jimmy Johnson poop sheet. Obviously, His Wife’s Bottom was being mistaken for an American, which in those days was a disastrous thing to happen to you if you were a man of color. Even during the most heated days of the great Cold War, no Russian wearing a tuxedo was ever mistaken for an American Negro waiter at the White House. Mr. Lloyd learned his lesson thoroughly. From that evening on, during the rest of his entire visit in the USA, he would not even go to the bathroom back at the hotel without putting on his long white flowing boubou.

  Also, and again meanwhile, Senator Huey and Carlton Carson finally waylaid the ex-ambassador, Throckmorton, and his improbable colleague, the Old Coaster. After a series of hearty handshakes, the senior Senator from Alabama bubbled over, yea, percolated with enthusiasm. “You’re just the man we wanted to see, Mister Ambassador,” he dribbled obsequiously. “You must’ve known this Olivamaki feller.”

  “Know him?” the red-nosed Old Coaster said pompously, like a British-type W. C. Fields. “I knew them all. Yes indeed. Three whacks on the bu-ttee takes care of them every time. They love it—they can’t live without it—and it’s jolly good for the bloody buggers. By Jove, in my day they didn’t blather about independence. They tipped their hats to quality. They knew their place, by Jove.”

  Carson and Huey were taken aback momentarily and looked askance at the Old Coaster. Then they returned their attention to the ex-ambassador.

  “Certainly, I knew the Prime Minister. We were fr—”

  Huey interrupted enthusiastically. “You knew him before these African uprisings, didn’t you? What kind of feller is he? He’s a Commie, ain’t he?”

  The ex-ambassador told him bluntly he was out of his mind. He had communism on the brain, taking for granted, of course, that the senator was in possession of a brain. Then the ex-ambassador moved quickly and deliberately away from them, leaving the Old Coaster in their grimy kindly clutches. One might say
the three of them deserved each other, admirably. “I was in Accra in the Gold Coast,” Vaughan-Johnson told them continuing in his kind of W. C. Fields–type singsong, but with very British accents, “when we gave them their independence. Just as the sun was setting over the wide Atlantic, the Union Jack was being lowered for the last time. My colleague of thirty years man and boy on the Western Coast and I—we and people like us—we who built the bloody place with our hands and sweat and brains, and there we sat, sipping our gin and tonics and weeping for the tragedy of it all, and the bloody Blacks were cheering like mad, the ungrateful buggers. My colleague turned to me and said, ‘By Jove, from now on we’ll have to brush our own teeth.’”

  Huey and Carson stared at him, incredulously, not sure whether Vaughan-Johnson wanted them to regard him seriously or humorously. Finally, Carson decided to play it serious. “You knew the Prime Minister of Guanaya?”